THE biggest reminder of where we are, already, was offered by the 53,633 people who spent their afternoons roasting in the searing Bronx sun. Right around the fifth or sixth inning, in came a welcome visitor in the sky, a fluffy, friendly gaggle of cumulus clouds that stepped in front of the sun like Bruce Bowen drawing a charge.
And the crowd cheered. Lightly at first. Then louder. And then louder still. Maybe a little later, when Alex Rodriguez would make a Luke Hochevar slider disappear over the left-field wall for a home run, they would offer up a mightier roar. Maybe. But for those blessed three or four minutes when the sky turned gray and the temperature dipped to a nippy 92 or so, the message was plainly clear:
Forget what the calendar says.
Summer’s here.
And in New York City, that means that the time is right for pacing in the streets.The Mets are 62 games into their season, and they are 30-32. The Yankees are 64 games into their season, and they are 32-32, thanks to a disheartening 3-2 loss to Kansas City that ended a disheartening four-game split with the last-place Royals, which ended a disheartening 4-3 home stand in which the Yankees had hoped to begin their inevitable dash toward the upper echelons of the American League.
“Well,” Mike Mussina mused yesterday, after heroically and fruitlessly chasing his 10th victory, “if it’s inevitable, it better start soon.”
He was talking about the Yankees, of course, and easily could have been talking about the Mets, and about this middling baseball season in New York City that lurches toward the middle of June and beyond, that has thus far yielded a few dozen starts and stops on either end of the Triboro and inevitably ends with both teams hugging .500, with only the chronic mediocrity throughout the sport preventing them both from being in dire, desperate ditches.
“You never want to lose a game like that before heading out on the road,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said before joining his team on an airplane bound for northern California. “We had our opportunities.”
Increasingly, Girardi and Willie Randolph have been able to swap sound bites and aggravating anxieties. You never want to lose a game before a road trip. You never want to lose a game before starting a homestand. You never want to get swept by the Padres, the worst team in the NL West. You never want to split a series, at home – and be grateful it wasn’t worse – to the Royals, the third-worst team in all of baseball.
You don’t want to do any of those things. And yet, with eerily mirror-like consistency, both teams keep doing it. One step up. Two steps back. Two steps north. Three steps south. Both closers, Billy Wagner and Mariano Rivera, were unhittable. Now, Rivera has given up two home runs his last three appearances, including the game-winner to the scalding-hot Jose Guillen yesterday, and Wagner served up a fastball to Tony Clark that was last seen splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.
The great Metropolis has become a baseball necropolis.
Right before our eyes.
“It’s not fun,” said Johnny Damon, who was certain he was going to catch up with Guillen’s long fly in the ninth until finally running out of ballpark. “We know we’re better than this. We know we’re better than we’ve been playing. We really, honestly believe that.”
Damon surely does. So does David Wright, who distributes similar quotes three or four days a week on the other side of town, depending on how bleak a week it has been. Mets fans, when they aren’t OD’ing on disgust, look hopefully to their 7 1/2-game deficit and know all too well that there isn’t any such thing as an insurmountable 71/2-game deficit.
And Yankees fans, their team now six games out in the loss column behind both the Red Sox and Rays, they look to last year, and to 2005, and to the muscle memory of recovery. As the weather turns torrid, New York baseball remains tepid. And no one believes it’s all that early anymore.